Why Rush-Hour Traffic Isn’t the Best Way to Rank Urban Mobility

The lens you use to observe something says a lot about what you’ll see. If you examined the human condition only during the hours of 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., for instance, you might find a species that isn’t terrible productive for a full third of the day. Your response might even be to call for the elimination of sleep as a way of improving economic growth.

The Texas A&M Transportation Institute, which puts out a regular ranking of rush-hour traffic congestion in U.S. metros, suffers from a similar myopia. It’s true that morning and evening commutes are a special form of hell with negative impacts on health and well-being. But by focusing on the narrow window of the peak period, the institute’s “Urban Mobility Scorecard,” as this year’s version is called, doesn’t actually do a good job scoring urban mobility—and instead arrives at some solutions that could hurt it.